Work on Craig Bartlett’s new Hey Arnold! movie has been proceeding pretty smoothly since its announcement earlier this year. (Give or take a few hastily denied rumors, anyway.) Today, Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie got top billing at Nickelodeon’s Comic-Con panel, with Bartlett showing off the first glimpses of Arnold, Gerald and Helga in more than a decade.
As it turns out, not much has changed around the old Sunset Arms. Gerald’s still cool, Arnold still has a football for a head, and Helga is still doomed to a life of bitter unhappiness. Unfortunately, Barrett didn’t give up any more clues about the plot of the TV movie, which is expected to wrap up the long-asked question of what ever happened to Arnold’s parents (and, presumably, what his last name actually is.)
The Nickelodeon panel—titled “Happy Happy! Joy Joy!: 25 Years of Nickelodeon Original Animation”—wasn’t entirely focused on Hey Arnold!, though. Fairly OddParents creator Butch Hartman was also there to show off a clip from his new show, Bunsen Is A Beast, and Invader Zim’s Jhonen Vasquez was on hand with a seemingly random Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles clip, featuring Adam DeVine, Anders Holm, and Blake Anderson from Workaholics as three-fourths of the world’s most fearsome fighting team. It’s not clear what the clip—in which Raphael and Donatello battle it out to see who’s best—is pegged to, in terms of an actual Ninja Turtles series, but it’ll be a big hit for anyone who’s ever wanted to watch one of the Ninja Turtles swallow one of the others whole. (And somewhere on the internet, another fetish just sproinged gleefully into life.)